How many iterations?

I can't believe how many times I've gone over and over each ship! It shouldn't be that many. Mostly its getting a good idea on one ship and that proliferates to many more. One simple example is "I'm going to texture this part this way in Photoshop" simple idea, so what, looks great. But that's b/c the UV's on this ship works in Photoshop. Next ship needs to be re-UV'ed and sometimes that means redoing large portions of the texture. So what seems like one simple idea can have ramifications that become clear with experience. I continue to learn... when will I finally know it all?

It Takes Longer

So the game I've been working on since last September-ish, almost a year. (took time off for Skyrim and Mass Effect) The programmer, Andrew, had been working on the game for 3 (4 now) years. His A.I. and other aspects of the programming were very developed and advanced by comparison to the art which looked like placeholders at best. I said well I can make spaceships easy enough. I imagined it'd take about 3 months. Model, texture... how hard is that? Well there are like 20 ships, at the time a lot of my methods were still old school by comparison to how things are done now. So every time I did a new ship or new texture I learned something I figured out or tried to find a better way to do it, resulting in a better workflow and product. However, doing that made me go back over and over and over all the ships for consistency. Its hard to manage all the notes and things I want to do along with things that need to be done.
Right now I model hard surfaces in Maya, Auto-UV in 3DCoat, fix UV's in Maya, bake lighting in VRay, paint Textures in 3DCoat, touch everything up in Photoshop. Seems easy, but doesn't everything in CG seem easy until you do it? hah. All that and I'm not even doing Normal Maps! I would/will when there are fewer objects/ships or more artists.

Merged

I've been blogging on a few different blogs that kinda all relate to the same thing CG. One for Indie Game Dev that was mostly in UDK, one for Unity Dynamics and on another site for Eterium the indie game I've been working on, on the side for almost a year.
Other than Eterium, I've merged all the posts from the other blogs in this one and will only blog here. I'll also double post from Eterium here with a bit more explanation and workflow as I feel like. I'll keep tutorials somewhat organised as Maya, 3DCoat, UDK, and Unity possibly others but thats on the to-do list.
Anyway its all going to be here from now on, more focused and more of what I'm up to.

Story: Getting an Early Start

I was just remembering a funny "new hire" story. At Luma, in maybe 2004, a young guy comes in and says, "um today's my first day..." There was no front desk at the time so we sent him to accounting. Accounting was like "What? Argh they never tell me anything, ok got you in the system. Go to IT and they'll set you up". IT was like "A new guy! Argh they never tell us anything! Ok here's your computer." He goes and sits down and gets assigns a shot (roto/plate reconstruction etc) and gets to work. About a month, the guy who does all the hiring asks me, "Hey who's that guy?" I said, "That's so-n-so. You know, you hired him". "No I don't know who that guy is!" After a little talking we figured out what happened. When Luma called him they said, "Come on in Monday". They meant for an interview, but he thought come in to start. Well luckily he was doing a good job so they just let it go. It's a funny start for a guy who went on to work for one of the biggest video game companies doing really cool work.
That's one way to get your foot in the door. He knows who he is, and knows the story. We still laugh abut it from time to time.

Green Goblin

This isn't really supposed to be the green goblin from the Spiderman world. I'm thinking more of a goblin mage or some sort of interesting fantasy character that will be in a in game engine diorama with a dragon (in progress in maya) maybe more, but first goal is static characters in game. His upper chest will be somewhat visible but he'll be clothed. I'll probably make his hands and feet as separate objects. Done in 3D Coat.

The VFX Divide

When I worked a college summer job in a factory making paint, half the workers were hired by the factory the other half by Manpower. The factory workers made more than double the manpower employees even tho you couldn’t tell them apart for work produced/position. This kept the lower wage workers from revolting b/c they couldn’t create a consensus among all workers to present their case/improve their situation. This divide was crafted perfectly to get the factory to work at 75% the cost it used to.
VFX is similar. There are many voices by people in difficult situations trying to bring people together. At the same time there are a large group of well paid, relatively normal hours (for much of the year) artists who have it good and aren't going to lift a pen to change anything. In the factory it was a purposeful, prefabricated situation, in vfx its not but the same dichotomy exists.
VES 2.0 is/was our best hope. The unions, for whatever reason, haven’t got a foothold.
I don’t know another way to rectify the situation, until it gets worse for more artist. As long as the comfort level is palpable for the majority of artists, its going to be an uphill battle for change...  not unlike the peak oil, global warming, I guess that’s humanity in 201X.

lots of updates

Been hard at work on our game, lots of ships and assets built, check them out at http://galacticrogue.com/?page_id=401
not much more work and all the ships will be blocked in, then generic textured so the game will have everything except final textures. Then I'll go back over everything UV'ing and textureing.